Almost a Mirror

by Kirsten Krauth

It’s very hard to get across the message in so few words. I would like to say: IMAGINE IT IS YOUR CHILD, Chris says.

  Liz shakes her head.

  But you need to picture your audience. Many won’t get it. We know so much. They don’t know the background.

  Yes, we can’t presume the public know who we are. It’s hard, isn’t it? I might just stick with BRING THEM HERE.

  Chris starts cutting out the cardboard, large versions of the paper dolls made by children, and glues their backs onto sticks.

  What do you think?

  I think they need to have faces. Otherwise they’re just anonymous, Liz says.

  Chris paints on their eyes and eyelashes.

  Mona watches the women work, focused, as their own faces take on the guise of children. It reminds her of Ro colouring in.

  The pleasure of making things in those days before school. Before it came with baggage.

  Mona starts snapping.

  Chris looks at Mona, direct this time.

  I don’t like being photographed when I don’t know what I’m doing.

  Liz puts the kettle on.

  Sister Mary comes in the front door holding heavy cardboard and starts playing it like a wobble board.

  This needs to be mounted. It’s too floppy. There’s got to be an easier way than this. I feel like a blind man on a galloping horse, she says.

  Mary has a purple cardigan buttoned over a polo top. A small silver cross sits on her shirt collar.

  Tie me kangaroo down, sport!

  You don’t want to sing that on the march, Kaz says.

  No one wants to remember Rolf Harris.

  Sister Mary holds the board over her head like a kite and Mona imagines her as the Flying Nun, paragliding across Coburg in a trail of purple.

  A phone rings and Mary jumps.

  Oh! I always get a surprise when it makes a noise.

  She answers her mobile, which is in a purple leather case.

  Chris lines up the cardboard children in a row on the table.

  Kaz starts reading a poem from Warsan Shire. Her voice gets drowned out by the rain that’s started on the roof. Mona looks up but the other women keep working. She stops taking photos.

  Liz peers out the front window.

  Look at that rain. It’s hailing! I thought it was the kettle.

  I’d like to put the poem on a sign but there are too many words, Kaz says.

  How about we write it on the back of our cards? Liz says. She hands one to Mona.

  Grandmothers Against Children in Detention.

  You know, everyone’s got this idea that refugees are longing to get to Australia. This idea that we are some kind of paradise, Kaz says.

  Liz opens the fridge and starts pulling out tupperware.

  Do you think I can put stuff in the oven yet? Do people want lunch? Is it too early for a G&T?

  The wind cuts through layers of denim, wool, gets deep inside their boots. The grannies line the cross streets with their feet almost in traffic, purple scarves scratching their faces.

  A wall of car horns heralds their silent approach.

  Kaz holds a STOP sign against the flow of traffic on the corner of Sydney Road and Bell Street.

  Liz has brought a small black trolley on wheels, a cage, with dolls propped inside. They huddle on the grassy knoll outside the Fijian Methodist Wesleyan Church.

  It must be the noisiest intersection in Melbourne.

  The dings of trams fight the conversation. All the women wear sunglasses as they front the street. Some hold their signs right in front of their faces.

  Sister Mary has wallpapered the tram stop shelter with the signs they made at the working bee.

  Beep-beep-beep. The traffic noise gets more emphatic.

  Mona sits back and rests against the smooth bark of a gum. It’s wet. Birds call above her but she can’t see them. She flicks small drops of moisture off the camera.

  Can you help me with this?

  Liz starts tying her placards around the tree, securing them with octopus straps. Mona and Liz hug the tree at the same time, arms enveloping until they reach each other. Even the strap is purple against the gum.

  A tram goes by and Liz stops, considers it.

  A large ad for Wonderful Indonesia glides past, dancers in gold with masses of soft flowers curling out of hats, holding fragile fans.

  Mona stops looking through the lens at the grannies, drawn instead to the clumps of people waiting at the traffic lights. Passers-by. Pokerfaced, nonplussed, awkward, embarrassed. Anticipating bad news. Scared of approach while hoping for it.

  A stunning woman in a tiger-print hijab grabs Mona’s attention. She prances across the street as if she’s on a catwalk, small children running to catch up.

  The brick wall opposite has scraps of posters from concerts months ago, scraped away by the rain. Architectural gig layers. Mona wonders at the performances and the punters and where they’ve gone, dissolved in the wind.

  Looking at the posters makes her hungry. She can smell kebab.

  Jimmy once had a job putting up flyers for gigs. His regular night, plastering and getting plastered.

  He’d head off in the Valiant at bedtime. Paid to do something illegal. Not much but enough to get him out cruising and working the streets.

  As quick as he could make it.

  They covered one wall of the bungalow with leftover posters. It always reminded her how far she lived from Melbourne.

  He would crawl into bed as she got ready for school, his hair smelling of greasy lamb and his fingers a swirly mess of wheat paste.

  The bedsheets would stick together the next night and the one after and for months until they would crust over, claggy in the washing machine.

  Chris’s poster at the tram stop keeps falling down.

  The travellers have given the stop a wide berth. They perch together further down the road like fairy penguins waiting for the perfect wave to shore.

  The grannies take up space. Kaz says that’s part of it.

  The black mirrors across the road on the wall of the Browns Corner Hotel reflect the winter sky, a throwback to an eighties night on the tiles.

  A man talks to them, heads off, and returns with two big bags of lolly snakes.

  A schoolgirl brings coins, fifty-cent pocket money saved, and hands them over, hovering in the wind for a pat on the head.

  A man comes out of the hotel, leans against the tiled wall and screams abuse across the road at them before heading back inside.

  Liz laughs.

  He’s like a cuckoo clock. On the hour, every hour.

  Mona is tempted to follow him around the smooth dark contours of the pub wall and take a photo.

  Most cars slow down.

  The power of novelty, to gawk at anything outside the ordinary, but not to engage.

  Sister Mary has a megaphone and her voice carries across the road and beyond. A voice that whips the world into shape when she wants it to.

  WHAT DO WE WANT?

  CLOSE NAURU!

  WHEN DO WE WANT IT?

  NOW!

  By the end of the afternoon Mary has her mouth full of Fisherman’s Friends.

  The cardboard cut-outs are planted on the grass in front of the church, facing out like kids waiting for a bus.

  A tradie reaches out his window to give Kaz five bucks.

  No, we’re not collecting money.

  Please take it, I like what you’re doing.

  He smiles. She tries to hand it back but the lights change.

  She yells as he glides his window up.

  Okay, we’ll use it for stamps.

  But they can’t afford stamps. Everything’s email these days. Stamps cost a dollar.

  Another car waits at the traffic lights and the passenger doesn’t look at Kaz until the lights change. He sticks his head out and points a finger in her face as the car takes off.

  Get a job, you hobos!

  Kaz hears homos, Mona hears hos. They argue the point for a w
hile.

  All the women laugh later.

  To cut a long story short

  There are so many secrets between women.

  Or even things women just forget to mention.

  No one tells me that my body will suddenly sprout strange things. The freckle on my ear and the unused earring hole that now looks like a deep gash. The flesh-coloured moles on my back and the little red dots that grow quick on my legs, catching the razor blade and turning the bath a bloody pink. The veins that spin purple in my legs and start to pulse out. The soft lumps on my scalp that get caught in the hairdresser’s sharp comb. The plantar wart on my foot that clusters and works its way through, eating my flesh outside in. The change. As if it is some mysterious movement, floating around in the clouds, and not something every woman at a certain age has to go through. I don’t feel ethereal at all. In drenched sheets and nighties. In black full briefs and loose elastic. A face flushed angry with hives. It takes me back to that wonderland where nothing was as it seemed, where bodies moved in unexpected ways.

  Bungee-jumping down that dark hole, too small to use the key and too large to fit through the door, tempted by Drink Me and Eat Me. No one tells me that one day the flow will become a flood. When I get out of the shower, I don’t put the fan on any more. Not because I don’t like what I see in the fog but because there isn’t enough time. To linger on the way my body and face are moving on from what I remember. Each time I look in the mirror I have to hit refresh to keep up.

  TAKE ON ME

  Castlemaine, 2018

  The bungalow is dark and the photos have shifted around again. Beñat likes to look, working out patterns.

  As he searches for glimpses of Kaz, he realises he doesn’t have a single photo of his mother except the one in the scrapbook.

  She was invisible to him then.

  All he has left now is a ghost of a family.

  Mona looks over his shoulder.

  Which ones do you like today? she asks.

  He hesitates.

  There aren’t right or wrong answers. Which ones are you drawn to?

  He points them out.

  I guess the interiors, the doors and chairs and abandoned cottages. I find them sad, though, forgotten. You don’t seem to have many portraits. A few of Ro. A couple of Kaz.

  I guess I see all of the landscapes as self-portraits in a way.

  I can walk past the same thing a hundred times and I’d never take a photo like you do.

  Mona picks up the polaroids he’s selected and moves them together.

  Being with Ro has helped me slow down, notice things again, she says.

  Yeah, he’s always stopping, never moving in a straight line. Drives me mad sometimes. It’s so hard to get him ready.

  I was always like that as a kid. All the kids I teach are like that. They really stop to look. Being in the moment with Ro, too, it’s helped when I feel frustrated and want to yell at him. Mindfulness is part of the curriculum now. It helps me when I’m having a bad day!

  Beñat touches the twigs and fragments on her shelf. Mirrors. Glass. Crockery.

  Maybe it’s also about collecting broken things. Putting them back together. It’s like writing a song. You feel like you’re waiting for something. I never know how to describe what happens, he says.

  I want to try and create an atmosphere where you can let go of that impulse to make connections based on critical layers. I want you to make connections based on an instinctive place, Mona says.

  She holds a block of wood in her hands, the one she keeps on the windowsill.

  You do it anyway, just waiting for that instrument to emerge, Mona says.

  I spend a lot of time stressing about it, though.

  But when you’re in the act of making it, you’re free of that – I’ve seen it. It’s like an immersion in a language, a language that’s true to you.

  Mona finds them in Ro’s room. The polaroids.

  The coveted things. His wishful thinking. Hidden. Protecting her.

  On her phone too. Digital traces. As if she can’t see them. His little stash of pics. Cache.

  When he takes the photos they appear in other places. Her iPad. Notifications. Sharing. Taking without asking.

  Like she’s got no choice in the seeing. Little echoes around the house. She feels like she’s interrupted something. Invaded. It seems so intimate.

  Like reading his diary, something she would never do.

  But she wants to use them, these photos.

  To move them across and into her own work. Hand-medowns.

  This falling. She knows this. This need to tap into sadness. That it can feed the work.

  But when the loss actually happens, you can’t move. There’s no room.

  Closer to the loss, before the forgetting starts, it’s intense, all your energy goes into it.

  But as you radiate past it, it’s a much more direct link, the one between you and the outside world.

  Taking the photo.

  It’s enough.

  BARBADOS

  Melbourne, 2018

  Mona borrows her mother’s car. It stalls every time it stops so she never stops, just rolls slow through traffic lights. On the freeway the car is happy and she reconciles herself to the road. The dark, one-track, to Hoppers Crossing. All the gigs are in suburbs fringing Melbourne, little satellites of loving fans. Melton, Dandenong, Riddells Creek, Sunbury. She’s never been to the outskirts of Melbourne before.

  She travelled on the train to St Kilda once with Jimmy, to Dodge’s shoot at the Ballroom. It was a shock to remember there were beaches in Melbourne. That you could sometimes see the sun and the cool blue of sky meeting shore. They’d eaten good potato cakes and kissed, salt firing on their tongues.

  The venue is part of an industrial estate, lined up between the mechanic’s and Bunnings in wall-to-wall concrete. Easy to get a park. Part RSL, part pokies, part bistro, part bottle-o. The stage is squeezed between reserved tables and two giant plasma screens showing the footy. A dance floor the size of a bathroom as an afterthought.

  Beñat came home from the first gig with his pockets full of women’s mobile numbers scratched on beer coasters. He laid them out like a collage on the kitchen table.

  The next day, the band’s Facebook page was full of women remembering how they came of age to his soundtrack.

  The next day, Mona made herself admin of the band’s Facebook page.

  Mona holds her glass of champers and wavers on the edge of faux tiles and wood. Bald men in plaid and denim stand in a row against the walls, fat wallflowers wilting over beers resting on stomachs. The women stake a place centre front, blonde hair, wanna-have-fun, sleek wet-seal leggings. Shoes they still can’t walk in after all these years. When Dire Straits’s ‘Money For Nothing’ comes over the speakers, Mona nearly turns around and walks out the door.

  The lights go down at 9 p.m. and the crowd keeps talking. The voice of Countdown, Gavin Wood, booms from the speakers and reminds the audience that nearly everyone from the eighties is dead.

  It’s been a long time since she’s caught up with Michelle. She can’t see her yet. She said she’d be late.

  One by one the singers come on and parade the passing of time. The excess. The Oz rocker. The New Romantic. The middle of the road. The one who straddles them all, the pop and punk divide.

  She knows every word, even of the songs she hated back then. Different women scream for different singers.

  Bruce wears the blond mullet and the tiny-girl frame and jeans so tight he sprouts a muffin top and shows his Bon Scotts. He rotates his hips and grinds into a woman in the front row standing at crotch height. At one point she reaches up and puts ten bucks into his butt crack, a human slot machine. She mashes his face into her breasts. By the end of the song Bruce is lying down, and the roadie has to walk on stage and drag him off.

  The opening bars of ‘Bitter Desire’ bloom into Mona’s skin as Scott Carne walks out for the first time, wearing a black T-shirt that has
a photo of Chopper Read on it. Ears. Who Needs Em. He pretends to lean on a walking stick as he makes puns with his own music. The mirrored sunglasses reflect his film clips. Her first crush’s voice is the same, though, a seduction, the song leading her astray, past the shuddering echo of a body that once could move to make her erupt, and still finds grace in the spins he makes. He reaches into the front row and grabs a woman’s hand. He pretends to kiss it and then licks the back like a languid dog, sniffing. He grabs another woman’s hand and holds it against his pants. The women laugh. I got the lick! I got the dick! Mona stops dancing and looks at him, trying to find the boy she spent so long dreaming up.

  She goes to the bar and searches the room again for Michelle.

  When she turns back to the stage, Billy’s appeared. Still beautiful. He turns the microphone more to the audience than himself, pushing it out as if offering communion. A note to lay on the tongue. She steps back so she won’t be tempted. He kneels at her feet, supplicant. The same pose as the photobooth. A flare of desire. For herself at that age as much as him.

  The woman standing next to Mona records Billy. She reverses the camera to see herself on screen and sings into her phone like a karaoke mic. She reverses again to the band, holds the camera above her head with the flashlight on and everyone follows, waving their digital lighters. Flames swaying in tune. The women singing at the front forget the words. Billy shakes his head. He kisses the mouth of a woman nearby. Mona remembers his lips. The smoky taste of him.

  My wife will kill me.

  He shrugs.

  Around the lead singers the band is tight, a generation down. A guitarist in Docs and suspenders jumps Madness-style as a woman glides her fingers up and down his legs. The keyboardist plays samples of the bits of instruments missing from the mix. The horn section. The saxophone solos.

  Scott Carne invites a couple of women from the audience up on stage.

  It’s nice to see some familiar faces in the crowd!

  The Sudanese bouncer who has spent the night hauling women off stage stands back with his arms crossed. The women can really dance, former lovers with scores to settle. As they move, Mona recognises them. The girls from the video clips. They take over the stage. The band fades. During the chorus, one of the women faces the crowd and waggles her little pinkie.